Your first concern is addressed by saltstack - they chose an agent based approach, with client subscription, as the default, which makes for a significantly faster experience.
They subsequently offered an ssh-based option for those that wanted the poor performance of Ansible across larger fleets, or where agents were not palatable.
Unfortunately it doesn't address your second concern, as it also uses yml + jinja.
yaml never bothered me, so I just used it, but you could use a different one. I suppose none of the ones from the list would make parent poster happy, but then one could write own renderer.
